Styles may change, details may come and go, but the broad demands of aesthetic judgement are permanent.

When gifts are replaced by rights, so is gratitude replaced by claims. And claims breed resentment

Were we to aim in every case at the kind of supreme beauty exemplified by Sta Maria della Salute, we should end with aesthetic overload. The clamorous masterpieces, jostling for attention side by side, would lose their distinctiveness, and the beauty of each of them would be at war with the beauty of the rest.

The welfare state that is built upon this conception seems to prove precisely away from the conservative conception of authoritative and personal government, towards a labyrinthine privilege sodden structure of anonymous power, structuring a citizenship that is increasingly reluctant to answer for itself, increasingly parasitic on the dispensations of a bureaucracy towards which it can feel no gratitude.

Modernism in architecture went hand in hand with socialist and fascist projects to rid old Europe of its hierarchical past

Being unpopular is never easy; but being unpopular in a good cause is a shield against despair.

Beauty matters. It is not just a subjective thing but a universal need of human beings. If we ignore this need we find ourselves in a spiritual desert.